Preheat the mash tun and bring the grain inside your house the night before and it will work fine. I followed Mort's suggestion on my last a Scottish 80/- mashing at 158F and the hydro sample at racking to keg was delicious!

I'm not a fan of mashing at high temperature to enhance sweetness. After almost 15 years of beer judging, I have found that one of the cardinal sins of many homebrewers is creating beers that fail to finish dry enough.

If sweetness is desired, reduce the bittering and allow the sweetness to exhibit that way. In my opinion, raising the mashing temperature is best reserved for those cases where the gravity of the wort is low and the brewer is trying to improve the body via reduced fermentability. In a beer that has adequate gravity in the first place, reduced fermentability is not the way to achieve a sweeter or maltier perception in the beer...reduced bittering is.

I'm not a fan of mashing at high temperature to enhance sweetness. After almost 15 years of beer judging, I have found that one of the cardinal sins of many homebrewers is creating beers that fail to finish dry enough.

If sweetness is desired, reduce the bittering and allow the sweetness to exhibit that way. In my opinion, raising the mashing temperature is best reserved for those cases where the gravity of the wort is low and the brewer is trying to improve the body via reduced fermentability. In a beer that has adequate gravity in the first place, reduced fermentability is not the way to achieve a sweeter or maltier perception in the beer...reduced bittering is.

I agree, I reserve high mash temps for session beers. I rarely go above 155 for anything above 1.050

More body in a lighter/session beer was my reason for the high mash temp here. Originally my OG was more along the lines of 1.045, but I decided to tweak it and go a little higher to 1.050. Maybe the shift in weather had something to do with it.

I'm not a fan of mashing at high temperature to enhance sweetness. After almost 15 years of beer judging, I have found that one of the cardinal sins of many homebrewers is creating beers that fail to finish dry enough.

If sweetness is desired, reduce the bittering and allow the sweetness to exhibit that way. In my opinion, raising the mashing temperature is best reserved for those cases where the gravity of the wort is low and the brewer is trying to improve the body via reduced fermentability. In a beer that has adequate gravity in the first place, reduced fermentability is not the way to achieve a sweeter or maltier perception in the beer...reduced bittering is.

I agree, I reserve high mash temps for session beers. I rarely go above 155 for anything above 1.050